Egypt

We again arrived in a new country at the godless break of dawn, exhausted and disoriented. Egyptian customs was easy enough once we paid our 15USD for a 'visa', i.e. a vaguely holographic piece of paper to stick in our passport. I'm not sure but I always had the feeling the visa system was somehow associated with keeping out undesirables not just collecting government taxes a the border.

Anyways we found a cab and headed into the centre of Cairo. It was while driving out of the airport that we discovered just how ludicrously thick with things historic Egypt is. The roundabout at the exit of the airport is decorated with a 4000 year old obelisk. A little while later we made a second discovery, our cabbie had absolutely no idea where along one of the biggest roads in Cairo our hostel was. Luckily Egyptians are more than happy to offer directional advice, and we had bargained for a fixed price at the airport. Several sets of differing instructions later our cabbie spotted a Fed Ex guy and made a bee line for him, turns out wherever you are in the world no one knows what's on the 7th floor of decrepit apartment/office blocks like your local courier driver.

Cairo is the base for seeing the pyramids, and in fact the Giza pyramids (the big ones with the Sphinx) are smack dab in the middle of Giza (think Glenfield but a whole lot drier (and with pyramids)). They seem to have kept the area behind the pyramids free of construction giving it a nice photographic backdrop, but if you stand behind the Sphinx and look at it, you can see as much of suburban Cairo as the smog will allow.

The pyramids themselves are as impressive as you would expect for 5000 year old man made geography, but unfortunately you're not allowed in them or on them these days. Luckily that's where the Dahshur and Saqqara sites come in. Dahshur has three pyramids but only one of them is accessible as the land is now controlled by the military. The interesting inaccessible one is the Bent Pyramid which changes slope about halfway up, when the engineers realised they were building at too steep an angle and the whole thing would collapse if they kept going the same way. The Red Pyramid is the accessible one, and notable because we were allowed to descend 200 feet into the very centre of the pyramid. The length of the tombs are strung with fluorescent lighting but on the day we visited they weren't working and Jacquie and I and about 8 other tourists descended all following the light of our wonderful little LED torch (thanks Tiff).

Not only is the entry corridor quite long but it is very low and at a reasonably steep angle. But after squat walking down we were rewarded with three vary dark, quite imposing corbel vaulted burial chambers, the second of which is apparently at the dead centre of the pyramid. Interestingly enough traversing the entry corridor uses muscles that neither me or Jacq have used much of late and we were unable to climb stairs without groaning for a good two or three days afterwards.

Saqqara's main pyramid is Djoser's Stepped Pyramid which was built earlier than any of the others we'd seen and was under some fairly heavy restoration when we visited. But the stand out here was the tomb of a minor official with a lot of very nicely preserved hieroglyphics often with a lot of the original colour showing. The thing that Egyptolgists never mention is that the ancient Egyptians were not the classy minimalist decorators that the ruins may lead you to believe, but instead the original temples were so heavily painted in bright colours that dark sunglasses would have issued at the door had all the original colouring survived.

The other big draw in Cairo is the Egyptian Museum which is at once astounding and hilarious. It is the back alley junk shop of the museum world, except the junk happens to be priceless, and irreplaceable cultural treasures. The building is two large floors with about 50 areas laid out on each floor. Each area is stacked with enormous amounts of carved stonework, statuary, funerary offerings, sarcophagi, and even a couple of rooms of mummies. Nothing is labelled, but everything is worth looking at, in fact if it became a text heavy museum it would take infinitely longer than the 4 hours we spent to peruse its halls. The really fantastic stuff is Tutankhamen's. At the back of the top floor there is a room dedicated to the objects found with him, the centrepiece of which is the fairly famous funerary mask, made of 11kgs of solid gold. Apparently as impressive as all of Tutankhamen's things were they probably weren't that great compared to other Pharaohs, it was just a fluke of another Pharaoh building his tomb almost directly on top of Tut's that meant it was discovered completely untouched by the ubiquitous grave robbers that put an end to the whole pyramid building thing in the first place.

After having had a big rant about Moroccans in my previous post its probably important to say that by Egypt was pretty much what we were used to, people would call out to us a lot, and follow us trying to sell whatever they had, but they got to the point and told us what they were selling and even how much it would cost a lot more readily than their Moroccan counterparts. Cairo in particular had a lot of cheap places to eat, including a specialist pigeon restaurant (don't bother they're all stuffing). The hotels were a bit more expensive than the food but of quite a good consistent standard. In fact we were never even offered an unairconditioned room which was a good thing as most of our afternoons were spent close up to the air-con trying to cool off from a morning in the sun.


We also got to visit old Coptic Cairo, their church of Saint George and a couple of small shrines. It was really interesting to see how much of a tradition the local church has about the two lines in the bible where it says Joseph, Mary and child packed off to Egypt for a few years. They have a purported itinerary and lots of holy sites along its length. We did discover that we quite like Coptic art (especially Jacq). They're churches tend to be pretty much covered in gold haloed icons and dark wood which make them pretty attractive.

After Cairo we were convinced to get a tour loosely organised for us, as independent travel is made quite difficult by the Egyptian authorities. We weren't going to be travelling on a tour bus or anything but we had our transport and day tours arranged for us which worked out pretty well. We started by catching the foreigner only sleeper train up the Nile to Aswan. The train itself was pretty nice but I made the mistake of brushing my teeth in the drinking water provided on the train and was very very sorry shortly thereafter. But to make up for it all for the first time in my life someone was waiting for us at the siding to take us to our hotel. Shame it was just a dude in a t-shirt and there wasn't even a car, just a short walk to our hotel, but I felt special anyway.

That afternoon we headed out the High Damn and to Philae Temple in a wee van. The damn is remarkably unimpressive for something that pretty much revolutionised farming in Egypt, breaking the annual cycle of Nile flooding, and creating an enormous amount of hydroelectricity. It also managed to displace a huge amount of the Nubian population of Egypt while creating the largest man made lake in the world, and for all that it was kind of lame, not perilously vertical reinforced concrete just a whole lot of dirt with a road across the top.

Philae Temple was more interesting as it was one of several temples in the area to be moved following the construction of the damn. Now adays you jump on a little boat and motor around to the island before wandering through the many columned courts and the hieroglyph laden inner temple. Unfortunately for the carvings, 1500 years before the site was dismantled and moved by the Italians, the burgeoning Coptic Christian population defaced most of the carvings while they were using the building as somewhere out of the way to have church. Always a shame when people taking their religion seriously gets in they way of a good photo opportunity.

Our second day we got up at 3 in the morning to catch a police convoy down to Abu Simbel. Egyptian Police Convoys along with the tourist only trains are the Egyptian version of security theatre, they stick a couple of cops with guns and funny helmets at both ends of the convoy/train, wave a wand and declare you safe from the sporadic but quite real terrorist attacks that have been carried out in Egypt. I don't know about everyone else but I think I'd feel a lot safer unguarded with half a dozen other tourists in a van, than packed into a 100 foreigner jihadi piñata guarded by the exact same guys who guarded the convoy the day before.

However Abu Simbel was worth the trip, another moved temple they managed to fake the new one quite nicely into the side of an existing hill, and the carvings were the biggest and most colourful I think we say in Egypt, and we saw a crocodile hanging around the edge of the lake waiting for an unsuspecting tourist to get hot and go for a dip. Apparently the damn also keeps the crocodiles out of the lower Nile.


The next day we took to the Nile on a Felucca, along with a couple of Aussies, an Argentinian, and two skinny Egyptian wannabe rastafarians that were purportedly the crew. We criss-crossed the Nile quite merrily and were treated to some very good home cooking by our hosts. And anytime we parked somewhere we were treated to a bit of Bob Marley as well on an old beaten tape player. The hardest part of the whole trip was having to rotate on the mattresses lining the deck every time the boat tacked and watching the expert boom lowering as we made our way under a badly planned bridge.


We got off the boat the next morning and proceeded to Kom Ombo on our way down the Nile to Luxor. The Kom Ombo temple was notable for it being (half) dedicated to Offler (umm I mean Sobek), and nothing much else really. But you can't really go far wrong with a guy with a crocodile head now can you.

Further down the road we reached Luxor home of Karnak, and the Valleys of the Kings and the Queens. Karnak is fantastic and was the highlight of all the temples for me, upon entering you are surrounded by a field of enormous columns, impressively carved and well, enormous. It is one of those really very impressive places that its hard to describe.


The Monarchal valleys were also quite interesting as they were the result of the complete failure of the Pyramids as secure resting places for past pharaohs. As most of the pyramids were ransacked by tomb robbers at some point the priests packed up all the remaining sarcophagi and built new tombs in a secret valley out in the hills. Later pharaohs got in on the act too, and this is where Tutankhamen was buried. Our ticket let us into three tombs of our choosing. Two of which were very straight forward hieroglyph lined shafts, while the last was a little twisty fullah designed with a false floor and hidden burial chamber. Of course none of this helped as almost all of these tombs were also eventually robbed.


We caught our train back to Cairo and from there caught a bus out to the Sinai peninsula (the triangular bit) and to laid back Dahab. We spent a whole week there, the highlight of which was a snorkeling trip out to a diving spot called Blue Hole. When I was not sucking in water through my nose I was watching big schools of little bright fish darting around and through the reef. Not many big fish but I did spot a fluorescent parrot fish out grooming the coral. Unfortunately Jacquie got a very sun burnt back from that day out so we spent quite a few days lazing round, reading Lee Child thrillers and eating regularly.


Fully rested we took a bus up the coast to catch the ferry to Jordan. While amateur geographers may realise that one could simply drive from Egypt to Jordan via Israel, the presence of an Israeli stamp or even an Egyptian exit stamp for an Israeli crossing would have prohibited us from entering Syria. So instead we paid 70USD each and waited 3 and a half hours for our much delayed ferry to arrive and whisk us across the glassy waters of the Gulf of Aqaba and into Jordan, land of politeness, civility and helpfulness.